Thursdays of Begrudging Respect: Actual Reasons Providence May Be Considered Cool

So. As discussed previously, the Telegraph is spreading vicious rumors around the UK that Providence is the coolest city in New England. It's not to say that there's nothing cool about Providence - it's just that the things the article points out as cool are... not. It's like someone telling you to visit Disneyland for the tidy bathrooms. Now, while I wouldn't recommend someone planning an entire trip around Providence, I can see a day's diversion from a trip to Boston or, I don't know, Newport? If you're the Newport type. So if you do make it to Pro-Town, which is a name I just made up, here are some things to do while you're here that are not entirely uncool:

Have lunch at Gregg's. Oh Gregg's, I love you. I love your pickles and your rolls and your free refills and all the Rhode Island accents and the old people and the cake. Oh, the cake. Instead of a wedding cake, my husband and I got ten cakes from Gregg's! And that's about all I remember. Go on a Friday and get the fish and chips and a big piece of raspberry coconut cake, and then cancel the rest of your plans before hiring someone to roll you back to your hotel.

The RISD Museum. Shut up, it's cool. And no, it's not a student museum, even though there is some real talent among those crazy-haired, big-glasses, skinny-jeans-wearing hipster jackasses that don't look before they cross the street. Yeah, I said it.

Thayer Street in summer. IN SUMMER. For the love of all things non-irritating, don't go when school's in session of you'll be weaving in and out of throngs of Brown students, and dammit if that won't make you just... look, I can't even talk about it. Just wait until June. Then have lunch at Andreas,' see an arty movie at the Avon, and just walk around a little. It's nice.

Wayland Square. It's a cool little shopping district with an awesome cheese shop, one of the last independent bookstores in the area, and an awesome underground antique store that will keep you busy browsing for hours, as long as no one else shows up, because then neither one of you will be able to move.

Roger Williams Park. I've already professed my love for the zoo, but it's a really nice park otherwise, too. There's a carousel and paddle boats for the kids, and a little botanical garden. Don't be fooled for the sign for the "casino," though -- it's not what you think. You may just crash someone's bar mitzvah. We have the real kind, but if you come all this way just for nickel slots, I cannot help you.

Russian Sub. Wait -- that sank, and then burned. Never mind.

WaterFire. Fine, go if you're going to go. You know you are. Just stay somewhere within walking distance, okay? And try the samosas at the Indian cart.

PawSox! The Pawtucket Red Sox are the Boston Red Sox' AAA farm team, and even if you don't like baseball, you'll have a good time at a game. It's cheap, it's fun, there's ice cream... and after some games, there are fireworks. If you like that sort of thing.

The Children's Museum. It's an indoor playground with hints of learning! Actually, it's pretty sweet, and the kids just go crazy for it. I genuinely appreciate how the exhibit about the old textile mills -- where the young'uns used to work -- balance fun and learning with reminders of how good the kids have it today. (Hear that, children?)

If you visit after July 4 of this year, check out the Independence Trail! It's going to be a three-mile walking tour with 75 (only 75?!) stops of historical "importance!" And at each stop, you call a number on your cell phone and a recording tells you whether George Washington slept there or whatever! Wait -- that sounds terrible. Sweet lord.

In Praise of Loose Definitions

So. Someone is going on record as calling Providence "The Coolest City in New England?" 

I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to call a big ol’ bag o’ bullshit on this one. It’s exceedingly kind of the Telegraph to give Providence such a nice reference, but calling it the coolest city in New England is like crowning the plain, unremarkable girl prom queen because she didn't put her pants on backwards.  If this article is to be believed by our friends across the pond, then we may be seeing a lot of extremely disappointed Britons mulling around the food court at the mall this summer. Even though the writer of this article went to Brown, the piece itself has the unmistakable essence of something based on information culled from Wikipedia, Google Earth, Weather.com, and PleaseOhPleaseComeToProvidence.com to illustrate our city. Oh, and stock photos.

Let’s break this down, shall we?

Like Rome, Providence congregates around seven hills. 

I’m sorry, what? Counting hills in my head… wait, is Federal Hill actually on a hill? I suppose the ramp off of Route 10 goes up, so… And does it count as a hill if it was leveled over a hundred years ago, as Weybosset Hill was? If that’s the case, I’m going to declare that my raised ranch congregates around the Seven Hills of Cumberland. Check it.

Like few other cities, Providence gives tax incentives to artists not institutions.

First of all, why do you hate commas, British? And also, does Brown University count as an artist? If so, it can buy a whole lot of black turtlenecks and patchouli oil with all the taxes it doesn’t have to pay. Go Bruno!

And unlike any other, it was founded by Roger Williams, one of the great iconoclasts of the 17th century. Williams was kicked out of Massachusetts Bay for daring to believe in religious freedom and the separation of church and state. He founded Providence as a haven of tolerance.

You bet he did! Of course, it was more of a tolerance born of pity, since he thought that everyone who didn’t share his very specific religious beliefs was doomed to eternal suffering, and by cutting them a break in this brief life, he was doing them a right kindness. But still. Whatever gets you there, right?

It is home to Brown University — the hippest Ivy League school, founded by an 18th-century slave trader, once home to Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame).

So, to recap, the three things worth knowing about Brown are:

1. Hip
2. Slaves
3. Emma Watson

Got it. Moving on.

Its greatest triumph is a sculpture installation called WaterFire: on selected nights throughout the year, volunteers in rowing boats stoke wood into wrought-iron urns anchored in the river, and set the logs blazing.

There’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world. The medieval smell of wood smoke in a contemporary urban setting, and the elemental play of water and fire stir an uncanny pairing of opposites guaranteed to raise hairs on the back of your neck.

Okay. Slow down, there, College. A “sculpture installation?” “The medieval smell of wood smoke in a contemporary urban setting?” So nothing burns down in London these days? WaterFire is a fairly decent block party where you buy your kid a cupcake and a glow-stick and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, for the sun to go down so some guy in a rowboat can come along and light some pots on fire in the middle of the water. The only thing “guaranteed to raise hairs on the back of your neck” is the thought of the traffic jam you’ll be stuck in after you make the three-mile trek back to the parking space you finally found after circling downtown for half an hour.

And finally:

Tiny Rhode Island has almost 3,500 miles of sandy beaches.

Snort. No. Cut a zero. California doesn’t even have 900, for criminy. And "sandy?" I guess you can't say there isn't any sand. And it sounds better than "bouldery beaches."

You know, the writer of this piece is a Brown grad who lives in Northampton, Mass., which may explain the lack of knowledge about Providence, since many Brown undergrads never seem to venture beyond College Hill. (An actual hill - and how.) And maybe it’s a diabolical scheme to get Europeans to spend their stronger-than-dollars euros here, because, you know, we really could use the money. So if that's the case, carry on! I mean, there are cool things about Providence. Actually, there are many, and being a curmudgeonly old coot, that is hard for me to admit. But for heaven's sake, don't lure a bunch of limeys (is that derogatory? I mean no disrespect) here under false pretenses. Personally, I'd fly to the UK if that was the only place I could get the garlic bread at Andino's.

And so, coming this Thursday of Begrudging Respect: actual reasons to visit Rhode Island. 

Stop it, Ohio.

This sign welcomes you when you cross the border from New York into Pennsylvania on I-90. Just to remind you that there are places that are crazier than where you live.  

I was on vacation last week, so I got to spend a whole seven days being annoyed with another state. I’m pretty sure we had the only Rhode Island license plates many Ohioans had ever seen, and to all the kids who won a game of license plate bingo after seeing our car, let me just say: you’re welcome, you poor, bored suckers. We chose a bleak little coal port on Lake Erie solely for its geographical distance from both Rhode Island and Minnesota, where a lot of my family lives, and the fact that it’s on a body of water you can’t see across, so I could pretend it was the ocean. The little farmhouse we rented was right on the water and adorable, much more so when you ignored the strip club up the street and the massive inorganic chemical plants that surround it.

Here’s one way Rhode Island differs from Ohio: in RI, if you’re at a stop light, intending to go straight through it, and the car coming in the opposite direction has its blinker on to turn left, you let that car turn left before you go straight. It is an unspoken social contract, and if you don’t do it, you’ll get an angry honk, an angry yell, an obscene gesture, or some creative combination thereof. Sure, people cut each other off all the time, refuse to use their turn signals at all other times, and generally act like total dicks to each other on the road, but woe unto you if you don’t let that other guy turn left before you go. If you do that in Ohio, however, you just confuse everyone. The guy turning left doesn’t understand why you’re letting him go first, and everyone behind you starts honking until you just go, already.

Also, in Rhode Island, we eat clam cakes, which is how we ruin perfectly good hush puppies. In northeast Ohio and northwest Pennsylvania, they eat pepperoni balls, a foodstuff with which absolutely nothing is wrong. NOTHING.

None of it matters, though, because while I was gone, this happened. And while it goes without saying, I’ll say it anyway: it’ll be a cold day in hell before I accept that Thylacinus cynocephalus was more cat than dog. Team More Dog Than Cat forever!

Thursdays of Begrudging Respect: the zoo.

We have a zoo in Rhode Island, and it's pretty great. Zoos in general tend to depress me, but the Roger Williams Park Zoo is spacious, clean, and none of the animals seem despondent, which I've seen way too often at zoos. There's even a little farm with rare livestock breeds where goats will nibble on your hand. If you want them to. It's so close to route 95 that in the winter and early spring, when the trees are bare, you can catch a glimpse of zebras and elephants as you drive past.

I can't remember the exact name of the bird in this picture, so I'll just call it a West African Crane of Awesomeness. Part of the cranes' enclosure is a pair of picture windows through which they watch the people watching them, and if you touch the glass, they'll peck at your hand from the other side. When my daughter tapped on the glass with her little Mater, my first instinct was to tell her to stop, but a docent standing behind us said, "No, it's okay. He's zoo-raised, and he loves that game!" So for the next ten minutes my daughter tapped lightly all around the glass with her little truck, and everywhere she tapped, the crane pecked. When it was finally time to move on, the bird gave her a look that said, "Hey! Where are you going?"

A few weeks ago, one of the giraffes had to be euthanized. The oldest living Masai giraffe in captivity anywhere, he succumbed at age 21 to arthritis and old age in general. His mate and child were in the giraffe house instead of roaming outside, which seemed odd until another docent explained that "they weren't taking the loss well," so the zookeepers were keeping them inside for a little while, where they felt less stressed, to grieve.

I see us going to this zoo a lot as my daughter grows up, and I'm all for it.

Come for the softball schedules, stay for the union-bashing.

It's Pulitzer time, and my thoughts turn to the fact that as news outlets go, Rhode Island’s are kind of lacking. The erringly populist ProJo, with its please-everyone-comment-on-everything website format, is surpassed in quality and journalistic integrity by the papers put out by your average community college. We have an NPR station (of which I am a member, thank you) that’s still high-fiving itself for existing after having broken off from Boston University’s station a few years back. The guy who reads the news for the evening drive-time updates sounds perpetually dazed and confused, mispronouncing words all the time; each time he reads the news it’s like he’s been awakened out of a deep sleep, given a sheet of copy and a candle and told, in an urgent whisper, “Read this aloud, now! The rebels are depending on you!” One time I heard him get to the end of a line of copy and then read the same one over again instead of going on to the next line. It’s simultaneously maddeningly amateurish and just plain adorable. We have a couple of local TV stations, and they’re your typical home-grown teams of anchors and meteorologists, some of whom have been at the job for decades, and a handful of “investigative journalists” who like to run up to people, push a microphone in their face, and shout at them. (“This city worker, whose salary is paid by your taxes, is picking up his dry cleaning… ON THE CLOCK! When we tried to ask him, loudly and very close to his face, why he thinks that’s a good use of taxpayer dollars – your tax dollars! – he punched our sound guy in the neck. See our exclusive video a dozen times at eleven.”)

But at least with ProJo, WRNI, and WPRI, you generally know what you’re going to get, and they generally know who they are. Not so with my little town’s free weekly, the Valley Breeze. This paper has managed to confuse and sometimes enrage me more than any other source of news that I’ve encountered during my years in this state. On the one hand, it’s what you might expect a smallish-town’s free weekly to be: the place you go when you want to find out what they’re serving for lunch at the senior center, learn which Little League team made it to the semifinals, plan the week’s groceries with the weekly flyer from Dave’s, or read a homey and simplistic weekly column about absolutely nothing at all. If you’re opening a business in town, the Breeze will write ten thousand words about it, and they’ll even work your own promotional materials into the article as if they were checked facts. The writing varies from passable to absolutely terrible, but it’s not a place you’d expect to find hard news, and you won’t.

It’s also not a place you’d expect to find hardcore right-wing politics, either, but you will. Amongst the listings for yard sales and church bazaars, the publisher of the Breeze, Tom Ward, uses his little rag as an unopposed soapbox to rail against liberals, Obama, progressives, taxes, Obama, illegal immigrants, and Obama. He’s fond of printing letters from readers who agree with him, and mocking those who don’t. He also gives many inches of type every week to Arlene “I Hate Unions” Violet, former Rhode Island Attorney General, nun, and penner of mob-themed musicals. More recently, the publisher has taken to running syndicated columns written by friends of his, like Marc Dion, who once blamed – wait for it – hippies for ruining everything. (Go on. Read it. It’s a gem.) And then there’s the “Traditional Parenting” column by a complete dick whose advice is sure to help you turn your sweet child of today into the runaway rodeo clown of tomorrow. It’s the kind of child-rearing advice that would make Mr. Brocklehurst say, “Well, now, that’s a little harsh.” (I'd liked to have linked to a lot more of the preceding, but anything over a week old costs $3 to access. Which is dumb.)

But the most troubling thing is that Tom Ward may be a genius. An evil genius, maybe, but a genius nonetheless. Rhode Island towns, including my own, can be incredibly insular. It’s not uncommon for businesses to not have websites and not advertise anywhere… except in the Valley Breeze. There’s information about schools and local goings-on that you can’t find anywhere… except in the Valley Breeze. So many people want their wedding announcements published in the Breeze that there’s an eight-month backlog. (At least, I assume that's why they keep talking about weddings that happened last summer.) The Breeze is free, and every Thursday morning, it’s everywhere. In an overwhelmingly blue state, what better way to trumpet your non-blue opinions than in a paper that everyone needs to stay connected to their community?

Personally, I’ve decided to give up that connection, at least for a  little while, because this paper makes me crazy. Even if I manage to resist the urge to read all of the editorials and skip to the “Living” section, I end up reading about how much Rhea loves April and I just can’t take anymore. So until my daughter is old enough to participate in activities that are chronicled in the Valley Breeze, I’ll just continue to steal the circulars out of a copy every week. 

My conscience is clear.

Wait. What?

From Kiplinger's via msn.com:

Wait. I’m sorry. I’m a reasonable person, so I know that Providence could not have been included – let alone come in third – on a list of places with favorable commutes to work. Rhode Island seems to be making a lot of lists lately, but mostly for negative things. So while it’s nice to see something positive said in the media about living here, it would be even nicer if those accolades weren’t complete bullshit. Let’s break this down, shall we?

Population: 1,600,642. The entire population of Rhode Island is just over a million, and not everyone lives in Providence. Adding Fall River and New Bedford – both in Massachusetts – makes no sense. Know who commutes from those towns to Providence, and vice versa? Nobody. Or at least very few people.

Average commute time: 23.9 minutes. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no. Maybe they’re factoring in the commutes of people who work from home. Kiplinger’s either ignores or doesn’t know the fact that a more than a few people in Providence commute to Boston, and on the MBTA, 23.9 minutes will get you from the Providence station to Attleboro on a good day. On a regular day, which usually includes downed trees and power lines, broken engines, and everyone’s favorite: massive delays with no reason or explanation whatsoever, 23.9 minutes is the time it takes to go from looking forward to a productive day at work to envying the dead.

Average length of commute: 11.62 miles.  That actually may be accurate, at least for in-state commuters. Rhode Island is pretty small, and any distance greater than, say, 15 or 20 miles is more conducive to giving up and staying home than actually traveling anywhere. Which is why there are people in New Bedford and Fall River who have never set foot in Providence, let alone commute back and forth daily.

Cost of regular gas: $3.26. Not even close. You might be able to pay that price today if you spend eight thousand dollars on groceries at Stop & Shop and then buy gas with your loyalty card at one of their stations. Which you do.

Public transit users: 2.9%. Really? That high? Interesting. When I lived about five miles from where I work, I took the bus a couple of times, and it took an hour. I live 14 miles away now, and if I were to take the bus it would take two and a half hours of riding, plus about half an hour of walking. Each way.

I’m skipping over “congestion cost,” “yearly delays,” and “yearly fuel wasted,” because I have no idea. But let’s discuss the “located at the crux of I-95 and I-195.” Look at said “crux” on google maps with the traffic filter on any given weekday morning, and you will see that it’s hopelessly jammed. (It made this list!) Just to the north and south of downtown, I-95 has two of the most ill-conceived S-curves you will ever see, especially if you’re wiping out on one, which people do on a regular basis, because they insist on taking them at 80 mph, when a safe speed is more like 30. A few years ago, a small section of the freeway that passes over a river in Pawtucket was deemed unsafe for any tractor-trailer to cross, so they have to take a detour or pay fines of up to $5,000. So far the state has made millions off of these fines because truckers would rather pay five grand than maneuver their loads through the streets of downtown Pawtucket or take 146.

Now, on to “40 parking garages… [and] more than 1,000 on-street parking spaces that cost $1 per hour.” Sure, there are lots of spaces on the street, and that’s the going rate. And you can park your car there for exactly two hours. At 2:00:01, you must have moved your car to another street (not another spot on the same street), or you will find a ticket for $30 on your windshield. If you want to contest this ticket, you may have to appear on “Caught in Providence,” a cable access show on which you and countless hapless Johnson & Wales students plead your case to Judge Caprio, who may or may not cut you a break. So you’re better off parking in one of the city’s 40 parking garages, which cost considerably more than $1 per hour. Hell, I pay to park where I work, and I spent eighteen months on a waiting list for the privilege.

Look. There are things that the Ocean State does well. Seafood, for instance. Vegetable-inspired toys with interchangeable face parts. And so on. But commuting, and more specifically, infrastructure? Oh, no. No no no. Kiplinger’s needs to stop taking meaningless statistics and turning them in to top ten lists and corresponding slideshows. Somewhere, maybe in New York or LA, some poor sap is looking at this list on his smartphone while he’s stuck in a broken-down subway car or in an unmoving traffic jam, and maybe, just maybe, he’s starting to see Rhode Island as an option. Hey, fella? Read the top part: “There’s no guarantee that you can find a job” here. That’s the part they got right. 

Dubious honors: playin' with the big boys!

That’s right: second only to California in some magazine’s list of the worst states in which to retire, tax-wise! Eat it, New Jersey (#3)! However. If you are considering retiring “to” Rhode Island – that is, you live elsewhere, have worked for many years at whatever you do, saved your money, and then you decide to spend the twilight of your life in the Ocean State – you have problems well beyond Rhode Island’s tax structure. Granted, there are plenty of retirees in this state, but I’d bet a tasty zeppole that most of them were born here, worked here, and are waiting for the sweet release of death here because they are Rhode Islanders to the bone, and maybe they can’t afford to move to Florida.

The really troubling thing here, and I believe it may hold the key to our state’s abysmal financial situation, is the lack of tax on precious metal bullion (see the second-to-last sentence). Why is this only coming to my attention now? Countless fatcats throughout this state are sitting on bars of gold, silver, platinum, and Cumberlandite, while the nefarious organizations that Rhode Island owes money to (hint: it’s all of them) are gearing up to break our collective legs. But it’s okay, people. I know how to solve this. I propose one of two things:

1.      A tax on precious metal bullion of, say, 100%. No, 1,000%! Since someone bothered to take time out of his or her day to introduce legislation to ban tax on precious metal bullion, and since it was voted on and signed into law at some point by someone, there must be a lot of it floating around, right? Or else it just wouldn’t make sense. Let’s tax the holy hell out of it. Or;

2.      Keep the tax on precious metal bullion at zero percent, but invest in an aggressive ad campaign to lure owners of precious metal bullion, like your Gaelic waterfowl and your miserly prospectors, to Rhode Island, where they will buy property. And when they do… bam! Property tax up the yin-yang like the rest of us deal with! They won’t know what hit them!

Budget problem: solved. You’re welcome.